There are lots of retirement websites available online. The vast majority of them are trying to sell you something. All of the banks and financial institutions have sites that discuss retirement plan options. They have calculators and much more. All investment advisers also have web sites that discuss the various options they offer. They extoll the virtues of saving and investing. We want to say at the outset we are not trying to sell anything to you at all.
In fact, we would like to hear from people about what they think about some of the posts on this website. We are retired and we read a lot about various issues associated with retirement and try to apply them to ourselves. When we learn about these issues, we write about them and put our own thoughts on the issue. These posts reflect our opinions and we hope it spurs readers to give them some thought about planning for retirement. It is not an easy subject. It can be complex especially when bankers and financial advisers are trying to sell their products. These include bonds, mutual funds, or their stock plans to you inside a tax-deferred retirement plan.
Wealth Management and Large Companies
They have very large divisions of people who are totally focused on helping you with your retirement planning. In return, they want your investments so they can collect fees for their services. They are making a lot of money off of their clients. We sometimes wonder about how much they are helping the customer. While helping themselves to your money through fees and commissions on trades and management fees.
We like to use web sites that have tools for tracking investments. Also for projecting these investments into the future for planning purposes. We look for the lowest fee structure for trades. We want to avoid paying someone to manage our money and get paid even if there is a loss. They should be risking something as well as us.
Retirement Planning Websites – Be Careful with Personal Information
There are literally thousands of retirement planning websites available and they want you to enter information into them. Be careful about what you provide. They may be able to track your investments and they may be sending you sales-related information often. Some sites do provide useful information. While others send information that is really veiled sales advertising. They want some of your business that you have been planning.
We use a spreadsheet that tracks our investments, estimates income, and estimate the value of our investments out 10 years or more. We know exactly where we stand at any time relative to our investments and our planned retirement. There is no need to update a website and we do not need to set up a meeting either to estimate our income. For us this is the best way to manage our retirement planning. It is our way of making sure that we have more than enough money when it comes time to retire.